Saturday, December 2, 2017

I gave this derashah this morning, and liked it enough to post it here. Feedback wanted!

Yosef Chaim Brenner, one of the top Hebrew writers of a
century ago, was born in Russia in 1881. He made aliyah in 1909, and settled in
Yafo – where Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook was the Chief Rabbi. Brenner was a
legend for his fiery insistence on what he believed to be truth, and he was viciously
anti-religious.

Brenner wrote a particularly strong article in 1911, “על חזיון השמד: On Predictions of Assimilation”, in which
he declared that Jews should stop bemoaning Jewish conversion to other
religions. Mocking Jewish antipathy toward Christianity, he wrote, “The New
Testament is also our book, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh… [I say that]
a Jew can be a good Jew, devoted to his nation with his entire heart and soul,
and not fear this legend as some form of treif, but rather relate to it
with religious fervour like the non-Jew Leonardo daVinci in his day.”[1]

Yosef Chaim Brenner also had no great respect for his city’s
Chief Rabbi. Brenner was once brought to seudah shlishit at the home of Rav
Kook, and he walked out, insisting he would never return. Once, when seated
with S.Y. Agnon and others, they went to daven minchah with Rav Kook, but
Brenner refused. There are reports that toward the end of his life he changed
his mind, but in his writing we find that he dismissed Rav Kook’s religious
beliefs as handmaidens to clerical ambition, his ideas as illogical and
confused, and his writing style as antiquated and opaque.[2]

And yet! Yehoshua Radler Feldman, a Hebrew novelist of the
day,[3]
wrote that Rav Kook said the following about Brenner: “Brenner had a great soul;
he was tossed about by great spiritual suffering… Once I met with Chaim Nachman
Bialik in Yaarot haKarmel, and he told me that Brenner burned entirely with a
fire of love for Israel, and he burned with the pain of Israel.”[4]

How do we understand Rav Kook’s apparent appreciation for
Brenner? I think we need to examine Rav Kook’s optimistic view of human culture.

1: Culture expresses Divine Light

To Rav Kook, “culture” refers to the unique way an
individual human being expresses herself, or a community expresses itself. [5]
It includes art and literature and music. It includes the breadth of society,
from urban design to political structure to religion. Our civilization is
culture. But most important, Rav Kook invoked a well-known midrash
to explain what we are doing when we express ourselves in culture. This midrash
says that like a builder working from plans, “Gd looked in the Torah and
created the world.[6]”

In other words: The world – which includes earth, sea and
sky, beast and bird and human being – expresses Gd’s Torah. And Rav Kook
extrapolated from this idea to teach that all we produce as human beings
also expresses Torah.[7]
Everything – our laws and ethics, our science and art, our culture – reveals
Gd’s will.[8]

Rav Kook expressed this idea in numerous ways.

·In his introduction to Shir
haShirim, he wrote, “Literature, painting and sculpture aim to bring to
realization all the spirtual concepts impressed deep in the human soul.[9]”

·The Bezalel Academy of Arts
and Design was established by Dr. Boris Schatz in Jerusalem in 1906. Two years
later, Rav Kook wrote Dr. Schatz a letter of passionate encouragement, and
guidance.[10]
He said, “It is heartwarming and exciting to see our talented brethren,
geniuses of beauty and art, finding a proper place… And a spirit from Heaven
has carried them to Jerusalem, to beautify our holy city.” As he wrote, this
art institute would “open sensitivity to beauty and purity” for all of us.

·And perhaps most famously,
Rav Kook said that when he lived in London, he would visit the National
Gallery, and he most loved the work of Rembrandt. He said, “When G-d created the
light [on the first day], it was so strong and luminous that it was possible to
see from one end of the world to the other… From time to time there are great
men whom G-d blesses with a vision of that hidden light. I believe that
Rembrandt was one of them, and the light in his paintings is that light which
G-d created….[11]”

To Rav Kook, everything we create
spreads beauty, and spreads enlightenment, channelling that Divine light which
created us.[12]

2: You can corrupt the light

I find this reverent view of culture a powerful idea, one
that lends itself to a remarkable respect for all humanity and its varied
cultures. But there is a glaring problem, perhaps best expressed with a set of
names from recent headlines: Lauer. Keillor. Spacey. Rose. Weinstein. Franken.
Zahn. How seriously can we take the idea that culture expresses Divine light,
when the most successful creators of contemporary culture seem to express the
opposite?[13]

And the problem isn’t just in music or
literature or cinema – we said before that Religion is also culture, and we
have seen our own Spaceys and Keillors among our religious leaders. How
seriously can we take the idea that culture expresses Divine light, when even
Religion can be corrupt?

Here we need to invoke a second idea
from Rav Kook: That it is possible to corrupt the Divine light we express, to
produce a vulgar form of culture. That was his understanding of Greek culture.[14]
But Rav Kook had a solution: This is why we have halachah, to shape our expression
of that light. Halachah places boundaries and implements structure for that
cultural expression.

In his letter to the Bezalel Academy,
Rav Kook wrote that every valuable trait, even justice and wisdom, must be kept
within bounds; as Kohelet says, “Do not be too much of a tzaddik and do not
make yourself too wise.” In the same way, we must be careful in art and culture
“to avoid intoxication and overreach.[15]”
Or to use the terminology of Nietzsche, we must be Apollo, not Dionysus,
manifesting an ordered beauty rather than an inebriated pursuit of desire.[16]
We express ourselves, and the light within us, and with attention to these
limits we will avoid pathetic vulgarity, and instead attain gorgeous radiance.

3: Appreciation of Our Potential

So Rav Kook had two ideas: That our culture expresses Divine
light, and that this expression is vulnerable to corruption and must be
directed. But he had a third idea, and this may be what drove his approach to
Yosef Chaim Brenner: That even if someone has yet to express Divine light
purely, we look at them as being on the path to redemption and purification.[17]

It’s no surprise, then, that Rav Kook
valued Brenner’s creative work even if the author’s poison pen was sometimes
directed at him, and at the Jewish religion. That fiery soul, that commitment
to the Jewish people, was the Divine Light Rav Kook saw, the Torah that had
guided the creation of the world, and Rav Kook optimistically expected it would
eventually elevate Brenner’s work. Perhaps it would have, but Brenner was
murdered in Arab riots in 1921.

I should note that I don’t think Rav Kook would offer the
same respect to the people I mentioned before, who stand accused of harassment
and abuse; where there is a vulnerable victim, one dare not display admiration
for the corrupt. But with Brenner, Rav Kook saw fit to emphasize his strengths.

This Shabbos we celebrate seventy years of Israeli culture.
Yaacov Agam. Nachum Gutman. S.Y. Agnon. Anna Ticho. Naomi Shemer. Daniel
Barenboim. Dana International. Uri Zohar. Matti Friedman. In the work of some
of them, the light of Gd is obvious. In some, like Brenner, we can see their
altruism even if we are turned off by their application of it. And in some,
frankly, it’s hard to see the Divine light at all. But Rav Kook promises us
that it is there, and orders us to respect it.

But this is about more than respect for others; once we
recognize the power of the culture we produce, we must also acknowledge the
dramatic influence of the culture we absorb. To view art is to bond with the
artist, to invite the creator into my living room and bedroom, into my mind and
heart - and it will shape my own expression of Divine light. May we choose our
influences wisely.

This morning,[18]
Esav offered to Yaakov, “Let’s travel together.” Yaakov declined. Esav said,
“Let me send some of my people with you,” but Yaakov denied him that as well.
Instead, Yaakov said, “I’ll go on at my own pace, and we’ll meet up in Seir,”
Esav’s residence. But that meeting doesn’t happen in chumash; what kind of game
was Yaakov playing?

Some write that Yaakov never meant to meet up with Esav.
Others say he meant to meet Esav at Seir, but it didn’t work out. But a midrash[19]
takes it differently: Yaakov intends to meet Esav at Seir, in the time of
Mashiach. Right then, at Yaakov’s moment in history, Esav’s culture was not a
good influence; his expression of Divine light was too tainted. But
Yaakov anticipates the day when Esav’s light will shine forth as well, and on
that day, envisioned with such ardor by Rav Kook, אבוא אל
אדוני שעירה, Yaakov and Esav will finally be prepared to join together.[20]

[13]
Rabbi Dr. Yehudah Mirsky has expressed doubts about Rav
Kook’s ideas about culture, too, and his challenges point to our problem as
well. He has written, “His
an extremely idealistic conception of culture, both in that [his version of] culture
enacts ideas, and in that those who participate in it are assumed to be driven
by noble motives… Along these lines, there is almost no sense in his writings
that culture is a commercial enterprise, that people do it to make money.” (Mirsky,
pp. 133-134)

Thursday, October 19, 2017

I wrote the following for my Beit Midrash's weekly email, and on reflection I'd like to get feedback from a broader population, so I'm reproducing it here:

Two weeks ago, journalists revealed that Harvey Weinstein, a very influential Hollywood film producer, stands accused of many acts of sexual harassment and assault. The story has been given top coverage on every major news website.

Commenting on Hollywood's abusive culture, Orthodox Jewish actress Mayim Bialik wrote an apparently well-intentioned essay for the New York Times last week, describing her own experiences. Toward the end of the article, she stated, "I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy."

Ms. Bialik also wrote very clearly, "Nothing — absolutely nothing — excuses men for assaulting or abusing women." Nonetheless, she has been attacked by numerous victims of sexual abuse, who claim that she is blaming the victim. Ms. Bialik's message of 'I help protect myself by acting modestly' is understood as alleging that victims must not have acted modestly.

This is not what Ms. Bialik meant, as she has responded. However, I think the fact that people read her comments this way is important. As the Talmud (Bava Metzia 58b) explains, we are guilty of ona'at devarim [verbal abuse] if we convey to sufferers that they are responsible for their own pain, even if we don't mean that.

I think if we are to be honest, we must admit that ideas expressed in Torah can be seen as blaming the victims. The Talmud Yerushalmi (Sanhedrin 2:6) associates Dinah's rape with the fact that she mixed among the people of Shechem. A well-known midrash (Psikta Zutrita to Shemot 2:12) links the rape of Shlomit bat Divri to her friendliness toward an Egyptian slavedriver. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 21a) states that the sages reacted to the rape of Tamar, daughter of King David, by prohibiting seclusion of men with unmarried women. To my mind, these comments of our sages are meant to educate about hazards, not to claim that victims of abuse must have put themselves at risk. But if they are cited without context, or to a sensitive audience, or without complete explanation, these sources come across as indictments of rape victims.

We do need to learn and teach Torah, and halachic sexuality is certainly worth promoting. At the same time, we who learn/teach these texts are obligated to be very careful with our words. As the Talmud (Sanhedrin 107a) quotes King David, "One who commits adultery receives capital punishment, but he enters the next world. One who causes another person to blanch [in shame] in public has no share in the next world." May we learn from the events of the past two weeks; when addressing sensitive matters, even [or especially] when quoting Torah, let us choose our words with extra care.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Like many Jewish children growing up in North America in the
1980’s, my only real exposure to Satan was via Dana Carvey’s Church Lady
on Saturday Night Live. To me, Satan was a Christian concept, a red-skinned
fellow with horns, a goatee, a tail, hooves and a pitchfork. You might read
about his adventures in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In truth, Judaism does describe a Satan, but for most of the
year we downplay it, barely mentioning it anywhere.[1]
That is – until we arrive at Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. The Yamim Noraim
seem to be the season for acknowledging Satan’s influence:

·Why don’t we recite the
monthly Birkat HaChodesh blessing in shul in advance of Rosh Chodesh
Tishrei? Some say it’s to avoid alerting Satan that Rosh HaShanah is coming.[2]

·Why do we stop blowing
shofar one day short of Rosh HaShanah? According to some, it’s to confuse
Satan.[3]

·Why does the tokeia
blow shofar out of the right side of his mouth on Rosh HaShanah? To combat
Satan, who is described in Tanach as attacking on our right side.[4]
Why do we blow shofar before musaf? To confuse Satan with multiple sets of
shofar blasts.[5]
And in some communities a Teruah Gedolah is sounded at the end of davening –
you guessed it, to addle Satan.[6]

·And who could forget the שעיר לעזאזל, the scapegoat which is at the heart of
the Yom Kippur Avodah, which some interpret as associated with Satan?[7]

Clearly we have heightened concern for Satan at this time of
year. Why?

First, we need to know what Satan actually is.

The Talmud[8]
states, “הוא שטן הוא יצר הרע הוא מלאך המות”
– “Satan is the Yetzer HaRa, and both of them are the Malach haMavet/Angel of
Death.”

·I know what the Malach
haMavet does – it kills a person’s body, removing the soul.

·I know what the Yetzer HaRa
does – it kills a person’s actions, by tempting us to sin.

·But what is Satan? What
does Satan do?

A personal Satan appears in three stories in Tanach. If we
look briefly at each of them, we will soon see a common thread which will first
show us what Satan does, and then, second, answer the question of why Satan is
so important at this time of year.

One story involves Dovid haMelech/King David.[9]
After putting down a rebellion, Dovid haMelech initiated a military census and
a mandatory draft. The Talmud[10]
is aghast; how could Dovid haMelech make this basic mistake? Schoolchildren
know we are not allowed to count individuals![11]
But as Tanach records, ויעמוד שטן על ישראל ויסת את דוד
למנות את ישראל. Satan arose and persuaded Dovid to count Israel. Satan told Dovid
haMelech, “You have no allies anymore. They deserted you to follow one rebel,
and they will desert you again. You cannot lead this nation.” And so Dovid
created a military census and a draft.

The second story involves Iyov/Job. The celestial malachim
are gathered before Gd, when Satan crashes the party[12]
and declares before Gd, “Business is good! I can go wherever I want, and I am
welcomed with open arms.[13]”
Gd responds by defending the value of humanity, identifying a single champion,
Iyov, who is pure in his relationship with Gd. To which Satan responds, “There
are no pure human beings; Iyov is as venal and selfish as the rest of them. Take
away his wealth, and he’ll blaspheme like everyone else.” This, of course,
leads to the great test of humanity that is the Book of Iyov.

The third story involves Yehoshua, the Kohen Gadol at the
beginning of the second Beit haMikdash. The navi Zecharyah experiences a prophetic
vision of this high priest standing before Gd, wearing stained clothing, and Satan
stands on Yehoshua’s right, לשטנו, to block him. As Rashi
and Malbim explain, Satan is there to accuse Yehoshua and his family of
wickedness, to allege that Yehoshua is unworthy of leading the Jews who have
returned to Israel.

Three stories, three faces of Satan, with one thread:

·Dovid! You are not a
legitimate king.

·Iyov! You are not a
legitimate tzadik.

·Yehoshua! You are not a
legitimate kohen gadol.

The word “Satan” means obstruction, and the creature lives
up to his name. The Malach haMavet kills the body. The Yetzer HaRa kills the
deeds. But Satan is the most sinister of all – by convincing us of our own
worthlessness, Satan kills our souls. He robs us of faith in ourselves, he robs
us of our sense that we are valuable.

At the moment of Creation, Gd formed a celestial entity[14]
whose ongoing role is to challenge us by telling us what we can’t do, to stand
on our right side, our best side in the language of Tanach, and to charge, “Is
that the best you can do? You can’t cut it. You should just give up.”[15]

Undermining self-esteem may not seem that frightening, more
like some watered-down, white-collar version of a devil-lite, but don’t kid
yourself; this work of Satan is a global threat. Read what psychologists and
sociologists say about 21st century humanity - about rates of
suicide and depression among individuals, about entire societies that have
imploded under the weight of insecurity and have consequently devolved into
racism, xenophobia and death-worship. It all comes down to the same cause: this
Satan is wreaking havoc on the lives of people and polities as it preaches its
gospel of “You can’t!”

So now we know what Satan does. And to go back to our
original question, at this time of year we emphasize Satan because we
understand the existential spiritual threat he poses on our Day of Judgment and
Day of Atonement:

·As I listen to shofar on
Rosh HaShanah, as I examine myself during the ten days of repentance, as I fast
all day on Yom Kippur, I am not tempted by the yetzer hara to repeat my
stupidities of the past year. This week, I have had no desire to hurt other
people, to take Shabbos or kashrus lightly, to skip minyan.

·But Satan telling me I
can’t do any better, I can’t grow, I can’t change, I will always be a person of
anger, I will always be a person of weakness, I will always be a person of
inconsistency, I will always be too tired or too stupid or too easily
intimidated or too feckless – that’s the threat at this time of year. Hashem
promises to accept us back when we return,[16]
and to purify us on Yom Kippur[17]
– but am I going to take that step when Satan stands on my right side, arguing
that I can’t return?

·Indeed, the Talmud
(Chagigah 15a) tells the tragic story of Elisha ben Avuyah, a sage who was
lured away from Judaism by Greek theories and who became known as Acher, “the
other”. He wanted to come back, but thought he had heard a Divine voice say
“Return wayward children – except for Acher.” Acher – you can’t! You have no
value! And so he never returned.[18]

But if we look back at those three stories in Tanach, then
we will also recognize that Satan can be defeated, so long as we know our own
value – not some artificially inflated sense of pride that makes us feel
better, but our true value:

·Iyov comes under the most
furious attack, and he is pushed almost to the breaking point – but he doesn’t
break, he wins his family back,[19]
and he is identified by Gd at the end as the righteous victor in that terrible
battle.

·Dovid fell prey to
insecurity, and carried out a census – but the tragic story ends with Dovid
buying a threshing floor and building a mizbeiach for Gd there. Out of Satan’s
obstruction, we gain the future site of the Beit haMikdash.

We can win – just as we did throughout Tanach. So even
though on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur we ask Gd, “ותגער
בשטן לבל ישטינני, Don’t let Satan attack us,” the truth is that it’s in our
hands.

·We can set our goals in the
heavens.

·We can get our tempers
under control, and we can start making people smile.

·We can learn a masechta of
gemara, or multiple masechtot. We can learn Hebrew. We can learn how to daven.

·We can become people of
mercy and benevolence, and stop undermining and putting down people around us
to make ourselves greater.

·We can take care of our
parents. We can take care of our children. We can take care of our own health.

·We can give tzedakah and we
can raise tzedakah, for causes from which we benefit personally and for causes
which benefit others.

·We can break off
destructive relationships, and establish the foundations of productive ones.

·We can make that most unhumble
commitment in Neilah שלא אחטא עוד, that we will never
sin again!

We can be גוער בשטן.
Satan is easily confused by resistance, and he has no teeth – Yehoshua and Iyov
and Dovid kicked them in long ago! We just need to stop listening to him, and
to recognize the value in ourselves that Satan tries to deny.[20]

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski tells the following story
regarding a patient of his, a woman named Sybil:[21]

Sybil
was admitted for heroin addiction. She was a registered nurse who had not
worked for six years because of her addiction. The reason she came for help was
that she had used up all her veins and had none left for injecting heroin.

In
the first interview, I noticed that she was wearing a locket. “Is that real
gold?” I asked. When she answered in the affirmative, I asked, “How come you
still have it and did not sell it to get heroin?”

“I’ll
never sell this,” she said. “This was my mother’s.”

“Let
me see it, please,” I said. Sybil handed me the locket, and I took the scissors
lying on the desk and made as though I was going to scratch the locket.

“What
are you doing?” Sybil said.

I
said, “Don’t get upset. I’m just going to scratch it up a bit.”

“But
that’s mine,” Sybil said.

“I
promise I’ll give it back to you,” I said.

“But
I don’t want it scratched up,” Sybil said. “It is beautiful and very valuable
to me.”

I
said, “So, if something is beautiful and very valuable, you don’t let it get
damaged, right?” I took Sybil’s arms, which were marked by the unsightly tracks
and scars of abscesses. “Can you read what that says?” I asked. “It says, ‘I am
not beautiful. I am not valuable.’”

Tearfully,
Sybil said, “I never thought I was any good.”

Sybil
recovered from her drug addiction and became very active in helping other
nurses with drug problems. She discovered that she had a desire to help others.
Now Sybil knew who she was.

The Malach haMavet and the Yetzer HaRa
are small fry; they go after our bodies and our actions. The true enemy,
unmasked at this time of year, is Satan, enemy of our souls. But like Sybil, we
know who we are, and we know we are valuable. May we, in our davening,
capitalize on that knowledge and use it to propel us to unprecedented heights
in the year ahead, and may our newfound commitment put Gd in the happy position
of being justified in awarding us a גמר חתימה טובה.

[14]
Abarbanel to Shemuel II 24 suggests that it is really Gd talking, but the
attack is identified as השטנה -
obstruction

[15] Ditto Satan
attempting to dissuade Avraham from the Akeidah, and shaking the confidence of
Sarah as well as the Jews waiting for Moshe to return from Har Sinai. Even
Bilam’s encounter with a malach which is לשטן לו is consistent, although that
malach was on our side.

[20]And this may be the
secret behind those rituals we reviewed earlier, which confuse Satan.

·Some of those rituals take the route of lying
low. If I don’t play up my desire to change, if I don’t announce that Rosh
Chodesh Tishrei is coming, if I stop blowing shofar for a day, then the voice
of “You can’t” won’t be awakened until it’s too late.

·But more powerfully I can also steamroll my
Satan directly, because like Dovid, Iyov and Yehoshua Kohen Gadol, I know what
my value is, I know Satan is wrong, I know I am capable of teshuvah. So I can
channel my inner New Yorker, interrupting Satan, drowning him out with the
shofar. If he wants to stand on my right, then that’s where I will blow shofar.
If he wants to shout against the shofar, I’m going to blow it before musaf, I’m
going to blow it during musaf, I’m going to blow it after musaf, as long as he
keeps talking, to proclaim that I am capable, that I can change.

Monday, September 18, 2017

Yes, I've neglected this blog, but here is my current draft of a Rosh HaShanah derashah. Please let me know what you think.

Over a period of 16 years, from 1833
to 1849, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a long poem in memory of his beloved
friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. It’s called “In Memoriam A.H.H.[1]”.
The best-known line from the poem is probably, “’Tis better to have loved and
lost than never to have loved at all.” But I want to focus on a different passage
today. In describing his own faith in the face of this bereavement, Tennyson
wrote:

Tennyson describes his cry as that of an infant; he hears the
voice of a baby in the emotions of a grown, worldly, sophisticated man grieving
for his friend. Keep that image in mind, please, as we look at a very odd
element of the mitzvah of shofar.

Shofar is a surprisingly vague mitzvah;
the Torah describes the first day of the seventh month as יום תרועה, a day for trumpeting, but it doesn’t
define what exactly a teruah is. How do we know what sound to make? The
Talmud[3]
deduces the nature of the shofar’s teruah based on the crying of a
particular woman in Tanach.

More: We blow 100 shofar blasts each
day of Rosh HaShanah, even though 60 should cover all of the possible permutations
of sounds. Why 100? Tosafot[4]
quotes the 10th century sage, Rabbi Natan baal ha’Aruch, explaining
that we want to match the cries of that same woman in Tanach. She cried 99 or
100 times, depending on your version of this idea, and we cry as she did.

So there you have it. How do we know
that teruah is a crying sound? That crying woman in Tanach. Why do we
blow 100 blasts? Same woman in Tanach. And my problem is this: That woman in
Tanach ranks as one of the coldest, most heartless human beings in Jewish history.
That woman was the mother of a Canaanite general named Sisera.

Go back in time about 3200 years.
After the Jews left Egypt and entered Canaan, Yehoshua led them for 28 years.
After he died, we were governed by a series of Shoftim/Judges for centuries,
during an up-and-down period in which we were often under the thumb of local
tribes. About 120 years into this period, the Canaanites come to dominate us;
they have iron, horse-drawn chariots, and they force us up into the mountains.
Their lead general is a man named Sisera.

To make a long story short, our shofet
at the time is a woman named Devorah, and she leads us in rebellion against
Canaan. Miraculously, the Canaanite chariots are routed. The soldiers flee
east, to go home; their general, Sisera, deserts and heads west, looking for
shelter. He is intercepted by a woman named Yael, who kills him. Devorah
composes a poem about the victory, and at the end of the poem she describes the
scene back at Canaanite headquarters, where Sisera’s mother anxiously awaits
her son’s return. To quote:[5]

“At the window, the
mother of Sisera gazes out and cries at an ornately decorated window. She cries,
‘Why is his chariot delayed in coming? Why are the hoofbeats of his chariots
late?’ The wise noblewomen answer her, and she also gives this statement to
herself, ‘Have they not found and distributed spoils, a womb, two wombs to
every man, spoils of dyed [fabric] for Sisera, spoils of dyed embroidery, dyed
embroidery around the neck of the despoiler?’”

This is the mother of Sisera – a woman
who comforts herself with the thought that her son is assaulting women and
stealing spoils. And her language – a womb, two wombs to every man – it’s vulgar,
obscene! How grotesque! What a mockery of maternity! Sisera’s mother may have
cried for her son, but why in the world would I want to model my shofar on Rosh
HaShanah on the grief of the most abominably cold-hearted human being
imaginable?!

I’m not the only one with this
question. Rav Eliyahu Ki-Tov asked this question in Sefer haTodaah, and decided
that we are not looking at her villany, but at our own goodness. We are contrasting
ourselves with Sisera’s mother. She wept with cruelty; we weep with humanity.
There is a logic to this, certainly.

Another answer is to look past her cold
villainy, and see her as a bereaved mother. As Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider wrote in
a column on the OU website last year,[6]
“[S]o great is the
grief of any parent for the loss of a child, that we all are left completely
bereft. The universality and commonality of suffering over the loss of a child
transcends names and identities.” Rabbi Goldscheider knows what he is talking
about; he lost a child. And I accept his point. But I don’t understand – do we
really need to demonstrate our compassion for a bereaved parent by invoking this
particular bereaved parent? Do we not have enough bereaved parents in our
history, on whom shofar could have been modeled?[7]

I
would suggest that the answer is not to ignore her villainy, but to embrace it,
to understand that her lack of a heart is precisely the point. We invoke her because
she is so unsympathetically heartless. This merciless human being, who
reassures herself that all is well by imagining her son viciously violating prisoners
– even she can crack. And that unadorned cracking of the cold,
yielding sincere emotion below, is what matters in shofar.

Rav Yehudah Amital[8] also
emphasized the sincere cry, in
an essay regarding Akeidat Yitzchak. He quoted a manuscript of the midrashic
Avot d'Rabbi Natan[9]
which describes the fateful scene on the mountain. In contrast to the classic
image of the stoic father and son, pure in their devotion to Gd, in this version
Avraham says to himself, “I am old, and he is
young, perhaps Yitzchak could escape!” And Yitzchak says to himself, “Who will
save me from my father? I have no aid other than Hashem!” Rav Amital explained,
Avraham was no malach, and Yitzchak was no seraph; neither of them wanted to go
through with this, and they were looking for something, pleading with Hashem,
to prevent Yitzchak’s death. They cracked - and as we say in our Selichot, Hashem
answered Avraham. It’s true that Hashem never wanted Yitzchak to die, but even
had Hashem wanted Yitzchak to die, He would have halted the akeidah because of
Avraham’s plea for Yitzchak’s life – because the most valuable prayer to Hashem
is that simple, sincere cry, like that of Avraham, for that which we love the
most.

This
is what shofar is about – expressing the sincere cry. Returning to the
beginning, I think this is what Tennyson described in his own grief for his
beloved friend: “An infant crying in the night: An infant
crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.” Simple. Sincere.
Lacking artifice and style, and all the more beautiful for it. Even Sisera’s
mother, at her moment of crisis, releases this pure voice from inside of her.

We may not like to admit it, but we nurture within
ourselves the seeds of the cold brutality of Sisera’s mother - and for good
reason. A soul open to every emotion, a heart with strings that can be plucked
by every circumstance, would drown in a sea of passion. We would suffer
depression at every hurricane and shooting and car accident and famine. We
would ride a roller coaster of joy with every birth and marriage and success we
saw on Facebook or Linkedin. We would spend our last pennies on helping people
around the world in need. We would overload in reaction to every news headline
and private conversation, and we would be left gasping for air, for emotional
space, for survival.

So we develop a necessary shell, but we pay a
price in doing it. I become much more at ease snapping my fingers to an upbeat
tune than contemplating loss. I become more comfortable reading a book of intellectual
essays about Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur than intensely contemplating what I
did for the past year, and why I did it. I would rather go home to a delicious
lunch than remain here asking, a la Tennyson, whether spring will truly follow
winter for me, for my family, for my friends.

But on Rosh HaShanah, with the shofar, we are
meant to penetrate to just those fears that inhabit the pit of our stomach. To
imagine what it would mean to lose that which we love and treasure more than
anything on earth – and to cry like Tennyson’s infant. Toward that end we summon
the image of the coldest, crudest human being imaginable, Sisera’s awful
mother, cracking, and we know that if
she can, then so can we. And our cry, at the moment when our cold is cracked,
is gorgeous in its purity, in its simplicity, in its sincerity.

Along the same lines, the Talmud Yerushalmi[10] says we blow an animal horn
because our own cry on Rosh HaShanah is that of an animal. The shofar has no
words, only an animal, or perhaps infantile, sound that emerges with our
breath, from our core. May we crack, and find that cry inside of ourselves this
morning, for just a little while. May we call out to Hashem sincerely, for the
sake of our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our friends, our children. And
may Hashem respond to us, as HaShem responded to Avraham, with a verdict for a חתימה
טובה, to be inscribed
and sealed for a year of berachah and shalom.